In the 2027-2028 school year, phones will likely be banned entirely in schools throughout Pa. What exactly this will look like in practice will vary from school to school, but with the bill already being passed by the Senate, it seems that it’s only a matter of time until these policies are implemented in Neshaminy.
While this may seem discouraging to teens, these policymakers have students’ best interests at heart, stating that one of the bill’s main priorities is to “curb classroom distractions,” as Senator Tracy Pennycuick said.
However, good intentions don’t always equate to meaningful results. In theory, the idea of banning phones should help students focus during class, but the issue is far more complex.
It’s important to remember that phones aren’t the only distraction in school — they’re not even the only technological distraction.
Neshaminy, in particular, still has one issue to worry about: In fact, a study conducted by a Neshaminy High School student found that 47.9% of students found their Chromebooks distracting, while only 26.1% of students found their phones distracting, meaning that 20% of students are more distracted by their Chromebooks than their phones.
With the use of programs like GoGuardian, school officials believe that students’ Chromebooks are only used as a tool for learning, but that just isn’t the case.
Every day in school, students are playing games, watching videos, completing work for other classes, and doing just about anything else other than paying attention to their lesson.
According to this study, students use their Chromebooks in fewer than half of their classes, yet nearly 40% of students say they play games on their Chromebooks at least once a week.
It was also found that nearly 90% of students stated they’ve used their Chromebook for non-school reasons, whether it be random Google searches, watching videos, playing games, etc.
This doesn’t mean that phones aren’t a distraction; rather, it just means that the issue is more complicated than “ban phones and students will pay attention.”
This raises an important question: are the devices the problem, or just a symptom of something larger?
The issue of getting uninterested students to pay attention has been prevalent for as long as schools have been around. Phones aren’t the root cause, just the latest distractor.
Most of our parents’ generation popularized passing notes during class, but they did far more than that.
My parents often recount stories of peers who hid Walkmans in their clothes, played games on their calculators, and read comics and magazines inside of textbooks.
A book historian, Professor Erik Kwakkel, has even found evidence of scribes who doodled when bored in their writing classes over 1,000 years ago.
As the years go by and educators catch on to how students distract themselves in class, students evolve alongside them, developing new ways to do anything but listen. Banning phones won’t “make students pay attention,” it’ll cause them to change strategies.
Schools can block site after site of games, but new ones will always pop up. And at the end of the day, there’s nothing they can do to combat students’ number one distraction: their own imaginations.
As long as students are still able to space out during class, there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution to making students pay attention.
And it’s important to note that while banning phones may help some students tune in, it won’t make the students who have already tuned out suddenly start caring.
If these policymakers truly want to help students focus in school, the solution doesn’t lie in banning every distraction, but in addressing why students are so desperate to escape in the first place.
If every generation finds a new distraction, then the real question is: will we ever find the root problem, or just keep banning the next popular distraction?
Sources:
